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When funds go missing: how FixMyStreet is helping fight corruption in Malaysia

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Anyone who lives in public housing will know how frustrating it is when maintenance issues just don’t get fixed.

Imagine how you’d feel, though, if you knew that funds had been allocated, but the repairs still weren’t being made — and there was no sign of the money.

That’s the situation for the residents of public housing blocks in Kota Damansara, a township in Selangor State, Malaysia, whose problems range from termite and rat infestations to poor water sanitation, broken balcony railings, and beyond.

In Malaysia, there’s no obligation for authorities to publish data on how public funds are spent, so it’s easy for corruption to thrive. The Sinar Project, an organisation that might be called the Malaysian equivalent of mySociety, are trying to tackle this state of affairs with a two pronged approach. They recently wrote it up on the OKFN blog.

As you might expect, we pricked up our ears when we reached the part mentioning their use of FixMyStreet. Sinar already run aduanku.my, a FixMyStreet for Malaysia, using our open source code. Hazwany (Nany) Jamaluddin told of how a part of the site has been used to help provide concrete proof that repairs are not being made, and to put pressure on the authorities to do something about it.

We’re always going on about how flexible FixMyStreet is: in case you don’t already know, it’s been used in projects as diverse as reporting anti-social behaviour on public transport to a tie-in with a channel 4 TV programme. One use that’s often been suggested is for housing estate management: if the maps showed the floorplans of housing blocks rather than the default of streetmaps, the rest of the functionality would remain pretty much as it is, with reports going off to the relevant housing maintenance teams rather than council departments.

Sinar’s project does not try anything quite that ambitious, but nonetheless they have found a system that enables them to use FixMyStreet as part of their wider accountability project. They began by creating a new boundary for the Kota Damansara area on the website, and taught community leaders how to make reports for the public housing blocks within it.

Since the map does not display the interior of the buildings, reporters must take care to describe precisely which floor and which block the issue is on, within the body of the report, with pictures as supporting evidence. It’s a step away from FixMyStreet’s usual desire to provide everything the user needs in order to make an actionable report — and everything the recipient needs to act on it — but it is serviceable.

Ideally, Sinar would have liked the residents themselves to make the reports: after all, they are the ones facing the problems day to day; they know them more intimately and would describe them with more accuracy — but as Sinar’s social audit found, these residents are all under the poverty line: most do not have smartphones or internet connectivity at home.

Instead, the community leaders make the report and this is then also processed manually, because the housing management company requires submissions on paper.

You may be thinking, why go to all this bother? How does FixMyStreet play its part in the project, especially if you then have to transcribe the reports onto paper? It’s because FixMyStreet, as well as processing reports, has another side.

We often mention how FixMyStreet, by publishing reports online, can give an extra incentive to councils to get problems fixed. In Kota Damansara the effect will hopefully be greater: this small section of the wider Aduanku website stands as a visible record of where funds have not made it to where they are needed most — to fix those rat infestations and broken balconies.

Nonetheless, the management companies continue to deny that there is strong enough evidence that funds have been diverted. And so Sinar, undaunted, move on to their next weapon against corruption. The incoming and outgoing of funds have been, and will continue to be, examined via a series of Freedom of Information requests.

We wish Sinar all the best with this project and look forward to hearing that it has brought about change.

mySociety

mySociety is a not-for-profit social enterprise, based in the UK but working with partners internationally. We build and share digital technologies that give people the power to get things changed, across the three areas of Democracy, Freedom of Information, and Better Cities.